Wendy Murphy Comes to the University of Virginia

The Office of Civil Rights’ mandated procedures for investigating sexual assault are tilted heavily against the accused party. The institution can hire “neutral fact-finders” who produce the equivalent of a grand jury presentment, deny the accused an advisor of his choice, add witnesses that the accused student does not request, forbid the students from cross-examining […]

Preferred and Prohibited Discrimination

Is the Fourteenth Amendment inferior to the First? If states are generally prohibited from discriminating on the basis of political identity, why should they be allowed to discriminate on the basis of racial identity? Consider Teresa Wagner’s much-discussed lawsuit against the University of Iowa College of Law for not hiring her due to her political […]

Should We Charge Different Fees for Different Majors?

In the first couple weeks of any survey course in the principles of economics, students are taught that prices are determined by the interactions of consumers (demand) and producers (supply). Prices for many things, such as oil, or of common stocks, constantly change with the frequent shifts in the willingness of consumers and producers to […]

Title IX: Not About Discrimination

Imagine a hypothetical gourmet grocery store chain — let’s call it Wholly Wholesome Foods — that serves haute cuisine specialties at sushi/deli/lunch counters only in its stores located in upscale neighborhoods. Now imagine the long zealous arm of federal, state, and local enforcers accusing WhoWhoFoo of discriminating against inner city residents and forcing it to […]

It’s Not Just the Athletes Who Can’t Read and Write

Tar Heel alums may be embarrassed over the scandal involving the amazingly low academic standards for “student-athletes” at the University of North Carolina, but for the rest of America, it is the gift that keeps on giving for its insights into the true priorities of our higher education leaders. This recent article in the Raleigh […]

The Sixth Circuit Undermines Affirmative Action

On November 6 the voters of Oklahoma, following in the footsteps of voters in California (1996), Washington (1998), Michigan (2006), Nebraska (2008), and Arizona (2010), passed  a constitutional amendment that prohibits the state from offering “preferred treatment” or engaging in discrimination based on race, color, gender, or ethnicity. On November 15 eight of the fifteen […]

Don’t Worry Too Much About the Higher Ed Bubble

Jonathan Marks, professor of politics at Ursinus College and an expert on Rousseau, has posted an important article on Inside Higher Ed admonishing conservatives for their seeming eagerness to see the higher education establishment collapse under the weight of excessive costs, insupportable student loans, and graduates ill-prepared for the workforce.  In “Conservatives and the Higher […]

An Unusually Stupid Court Ruling

Yesterday the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that Michigan’s Proposal 2 violates the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.  Proposal 2 was a ballot initiative that amended the state constitution to provide that state and local government agencies (including public universities) in Michigan “shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment […]

Three Cheers for Ira Stoll

On “Future of Capitalism,” Ira Stoll has excoriated two anonymous Harvard Kennedy School professors for their allegedly candid assessments of Paula Broadwell, who is at the center of one of those recurring sex and government scandals. Stoll’s account takes the anonymous professors to task for violating a trust, he insists, that is supposed to be […]

Indoctrinating Students Isn’t Easy

UCLA has found a novel way to improve the politicization of its curriculum. UCLA Today, the faculty and staff newspaper, reports that the university’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the Sustainability Committee have teamed up to help faculty members across the university figure out ways to slip sustainability messages into their classes, regardless […]

Vague-Talking and the Loss of English

In the mid-1980s, American English was overwhelmed by a linguistic mutation that transferred the burden of verbal communication fraom speaker to listener.  Because it sidestepped the need for vocabulary and clarity, and because its shapeless syntax shielded speakers from the risk of saying something insensitive or incorrect, this new mode of expression won rapid acceptance, jumping […]

Our ‘Historically Illiterate’ Young

David McCullough on 60 Minutes last night: “We are raising children in America today who are by and large historically illiterate…I ran into some students on university campuses who were bright and attractive and likeable. And I was just stunned by how much they didn’t know. One young woman at a university in the Midwest […]

Sending the Wrong Students to College

  < As a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, I taught large lecture courses for years, basing grades on multiple-choice tests. So only after retiring, and offering to teach a small seminar for free, did I discover something important about student writing: it was awful.The short weekly papers turned in by my seminar students […]

Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover, But…

You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, or its title, but how about from an extended interview with the authors? On November 2, Inside Higher Ed carried such an interview with the three authors of a new book entitled Occupying the Academy. The authors, Christine Clark (a professor of multicultural education at UNLV), Kenneth […]

Out of Sync: America’s University Faculty

Obama’s Win Is An Indictment of Higher Education

This morning in the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes summed up one condition of the Republican Party: “What’s their problem? In Senate races, it’s bad candidates: old hacks (Wisconsin), young hacks (Florida), youngsters (Ohio), Tea Party types who can’t talk about abortion sensibly (Missouri, Indiana), retreads (Virginia), lousy campaigners (North Dakota) and Washington veterans (Michigan). Losers […]

We Can’t Fix Higher Ed Through Public Policy

Is it true that only some recipients of student loans are getting their money’s worth–those with “majors closely aligned with actual occupations” such as engineers or computer scientists? Daniel Foster of National Review Online makes that argument in The American Spectator. These students, he says, are more employable and earn more upon leaving college than […]

Duke Goes After a Critic in the Lacrosse Case

Six years ago, Duke University suffered a high-profile humiliation from which it is still struggling to recover. Students on Duke’s lacrosse team were accused of a brutal sexual assault on a local stripper who had been hired to perform at a party. The charges were false. But in the interval between the initial headlines and […]

Barry Commoner, Connected

Barry Commoner died on September 30 at age 95. His passing shouldn’t go unmarked, as he was one of the architects of what has become the dominant ideological movement on American college campuses:  sustainability. Commoner, a professor of biology and a third party candidate in 1980 for President of the United States, was the chief […]

We Must Embrace Higher Ed Reform

The History Channel’s popular series “The Men Who Built America” portrays an incredibly wealthy – yet worried – John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller, who earned much of his vast fortune by producing and refining kerosene, was facing competition not from rival magnates – the Carnegies or Vanderbilts – but from the likes of Thomas Edison and […]